Canonical Seeks Independent Developers for Ubuntu Linux

Are you an app developer with an "itch to scratch," or an independent programmer eager for more exposure to the open source channel? If so, the Canonical team is building a site just for you, to help you integrate your work into Ubuntu. Here's a look at what the company has done so far.

The developer portal of the Ubuntu website, developer.ubuntu.com, has been around for a while now, but Canonical employees David Planella and John Oxton made its expansion and design the focus of a recent session during Ubuntu App Developer Week. The proceedings of their discussion reveal some important insights into Canonical's plan for engaging new developers and expanding Ubuntu's application profile.

A Website That Gets to the Point

First of all, as Oxton explained, Canonical's focus in building the site is not to cater to large-scale developers who have already made their mark in the open source ecosystem, such as those behind LibreOffice or Thunderbird. Canonical certainly wants to continue working with such developers, but since their applications are already "advanced and relatively mature and, importantly, already on Ubuntu ... we aren't really targeting developers of these kinds of apps because they are already working it out."

"Instead," Oxton said, "we want to start a dialogue with individuals, or small teams, with an 'itch to scratch,' or small indie developers/companies who are already making small, useful or just plain cool apps for other platforms."

Oxton showcased different iterations of design proposals for the Ubuntu App Developer Site intended to cater to such programmers. The first version, available at madebymake.com with login "developer" and password "ubuntu," was superceded by a second sketch designed to make it easier for the site's users to get directly to the process of building applications.

The central resource around which the site is focused is Quickly, a tool that aims to streamline the development of applications on Linux by tying together and simplifying the different parts of the process, from programming to GUI design to packaging.

Big-Name vs. Independent Apps

Whatever the particular components of the developer website end up being, Canonical's conscious choice to focus on bringing developers from smaller organizations to the Ubuntu table is significant.

Calls for Ubuntu to support more big-name apps from the closed source world, such as Photoshop or Microsoft Publisher, have long been a feature of Canonical's discourse with Ubuntu users. It appears, however, that the company hopes to expand Ubuntu's app repositories not by bringing well-known commercial software into them, but by focusing on independent applications that already exist on other platforms and whose developers might be interested in porting them to Ubuntu if they had an easy way of doing so -- which the Ubuntu App Developer site should provide.

Some users will likely complain that Ubuntu will not be fully competitive with closed source operating systems until it can seamlessly run all of the dominant commercial applications available on Windows and OS X. But realistically, Canonical's decision to focus instead on smaller projects is one that makes more sense, and which can be accomplished in less time.

Discuss this Article 16

jg (not verified)

on Sep 14, 2011

Yeah, because Canonical has such a great rapport with developers. Just ask the Banshee, kernel, and GNOME devs if you don't believe me. And don't forget to sign that Canonical contributor agreement, so Canonical can take your work proprietary. And oh yeah, Project Harmony, which Shuttleworth loves so much because it gives corporations the right to exploit individual programmers work, is surely the path to success for a small-time programmer indebting himself to Shuttleworth's corporation.
Canonical has been floundering for years at profitability. And smart developers know to stay away from the most parasitic, self-serving, non-transparent company that ever rode upon the coattails of OSS devs.

"Canonical has been floundering for years at profitability. And smart developers know to stay away from the most parasitic, self-serving, non-transparent company that ever rode upon the coattails of OSS devs."
and so the OSS guys will carry on fighting between themselves and collapse in a heap while the M$ reaps the benefits. Why can you guys not stick together as a united front to strengthen OSS instead of bickering about your own personal differences? Remember nobody will ever look at the world like you do so just accept there different view points and move forward.
PE

There We have it folks! Ubuntu has burned so many bridges that this is what it has come to now! Word gets out fast Mark when you cut the throats of good people. Who in there right freaking mind would cater to this garbage. Mark Shuttleworth you made your bed NOW LYE IN IT!

It is unfortunate that both the positive and negative comments here have been unrelated to the article. jg in particular has it exactly backwards. This is not about the software shipped on the Ubuntu CD. It is about letting application developers publish applications, when and how they want, for easy installation by Ubuntu users.
Separately, this article is an example of how using the word “support” when discussing software causes muddled thinking. “Calls for Ubuntu to support more big-name apps from the closed source world” makes no sense. Those applications are developed by other companies who have chosen not to make them available for Ubuntu. Nobody with at least a vague understanding of operating systems expects Windows to “support” Mac applications, or vice versa.
What is a real-world goal is for Ubuntu to become easier and more attractive as a target for application developers. The developer site is an important piece of this puzzle.

@jg The contributer agreement only applies to a small set of projects (http://www.canonical.com/contributors), which as far as I can tell are mostly OS-level type utilities which have primarily been developed by paid Canonical developers (such as the desktop shell, the ubuntu one cloud sync services, update manager), and not to 3rd party apps. While I am not a big fan of these types of agreements in general, stating Canonical will "take your work proprietary" is a bit of hyperbole. They could not do that to new apps you created on your own. And if you did want to contribute to one of their covered projects, your code would still open source and forkable.
Back on topic - I think this new site is a great resource. Compared to other platforms, desktop Linux lacks a centralized resource for documentation of APIs, tutorials, etc, (which is not surprising at all given it's decentralized nature). Canonical is making an effort to address this.
And as for Quickly, as far as I can tell there's nothing about it that ties your app to Ubuntu. It's a developer tool that streamlines creation of PyGTK apps and their distribution through Ubuntu. You should be able to take those same apps and repackage them for other distros and possibly even Mac and Windows.

I'm eager to put some apps on the paid section of the Ubuntu Software Center. I hope Canonical caters to both open and closed, free and commercial independent developers. I'm not interested in giving my work for free.

@Aleve - that's exactly what the intent is. One place to learn about developing for or porting to Linux obviously focused on Ubuntu.
Today you can submit apps at https://myapps.developer.ubuntu.com for both libre+gratis or proprietary+paid (and other combinations) applications. Simple easy to use interface for submitting applications for the Ubuntu Software Center.
Do provide feedback!

Canonical itself has no means to get the large software houses to start supporting GNU/Linux. What they can do, is to make it easier for smaller developers to start writing and publishing their applications on different platforms. It is also cool if it becomes easy for FOSS developers to get some cash for their work.
But what is really important is to make it easy, fast and fun to develop on Ubuntu. Quickly certainly achieves that, although its got ways to go. The good thing about developing on Ubuntu is that its inherently platform independent. And now Ubuntu One seems to be expanding free infrastructure onto Windows. This provides Canonical with a bigger market, of course, but having this infrastructure on Windows will be beneficial to the entire FOSS community. I'm mostly talking about Python, DBus, GTK, DesktopCouch, and tools like that. These tools represent no kind of lock-in, like some people in this discussion seem to be suggesting. They're valuable to everyone and most of it is already available on Windows, but users need some kind of incentive to install it all. Ubuntu One can provide that incentive and then it becomes easier for people to develop applications that work, not only on Ubuntu and Windows, but on any GNU/Linux distro.
If we want the big software houses, like Adobe, EA Games, Blizzard, etc, then what we need is more users. It's that simple. If we want more users, then we need more software. If we want more software, then we need more developers. People can criticize software economics all they like, but this is reality. We have some beautiful development tools in the free world, but it isn't enough. You need guidance and some sort of coherence. I think Ubuntu is getting there, and it's really nice to see.